I am thinking the class would handle an exception by setting default values.
Thanks for the input guys!
I figured I would init the fields to a hard-coded value in a catch block if an exception occured in the static init block.
How about making the fields private static (non-final) so I could update their values (from the database )after a given amount of time. Of course the class would then need static accessor methods.
JDK 1.3 has a Timer class that could do the job of scheduling the updates, but I'm using JDK 1.2